Field notes and platform updates.
Articles about cave data, the technology behind The KEEP, and the caving community.
Why Cave Data Gets Lost, and How to Stop It Coming soon
A look at how decades of survey data vanishes when cavers retire, grottos dissolve, or hosting bills go unpaid, and what a permanent archive actually needs to survive: versioned claims, portable exports, and a community willing to carry it forward.
Building a Trust System for Sensitive Karst Data Coming soon
How we designed the permission model, why geographic access zones beat rigid state boundaries, and the tradeoffs between openness and protection.
How the Extraction Engine Reads a 1987 Trip Report Coming soon
The hybrid pipeline that extracts cave names, depths, and coordinates from scanned PDFs — what it gets right, what it misses, and how community validation closes the gap.
Importing a Grotto's 40-year Newsletter Archive Coming soon
A walk-through of bulk-uploading decades of PDF newsletters, what the extraction pipeline pulled out on a real archive, and the review queue that turned it into a searchable record.
Coordinates Without Leaks: How KEEP Gates Location Data Coming soon
A technical look at how every request is gated on access level, why thumbnails are signed, and how Sentry events scrub coordinates before they leave the server.